Love it or hate it, Spam is here to stay — although you’re definitely in the majority if you really don’t care for it. For years, mainstream opinion has denounced the canned pork product, so much that its very name has been used as the slang term for undesirable email that you can’t avoid and just want to drag into the trash.

Spam, a product of Hormel Foods, is almost synonymous with “processed food,” yet with its unnaturally rectangular shape, it’s a product so peculiar that it has become sort of a cult food item. In many developing nations, particularly in the Pacific, Spam is a part of the culinary culture — a remnant of the days of American military bases that required cheap canned meat. I myself am Filipino-American and grew up with Spam, and I quite enjoyed it for breakfast. So I wasn’t too shy about trying a house-cured gourmet version of it.